I'm a big fan of narrative.

Through the end of 1999, I flew almost continuously. After about three and a half months of flying I decided I wouldn't fly for a year. The year that I was in the US solidly. The only option from moving around the US and Canada was traveling by train. I loved traveling by train. Through my travels I saw a lot of the US and met tens of regular sometimes mildly eccentric Americans and heard their stories. It was a fascinating experience.

Traveling through the US, I suspect somewhere in the American heartland, I had dinner with a woman in her late 50s, perhaps early 60s. She was a softly spoken Texan who told me a little about her life. She had a son in Los Angeles. She was worried about him. She'd got him a little dog as he was busy with his work. But she was concerned that he neglected the dog a little. No perhaps that was too harsh. She just wasn't sure if the dog was an ideal gift for someone as busy as her son. Through the conversation it turned out her son was a television producer. Had I heard of the show, King of the Hill? I had dinner with the real life Peggy Hill that evening on a train somewhere in the American heartland.

Good night.

I'm feeling a little under the weather this evening, but I'm tuning into WeFunk for the first hour or so at least. I'm Vitamin C-ed up.

Flying on Funk

For the past week, in the evening I have been going through WeFunk's greatest and firing up PreFlight.

http://www.preflightsim.com/

The website is a little on the ugly, my first HTML experiment, side. But it's clear that the developer has just put all their time into the software. Very smooth. A number of planes and a number of grounds in the free version. I'm going to upgrade to the paid version in the new year, once I have warn out the free version. I suspect I could fly the real thing based on a few hours of playing PreFlight. I would like to get more chaotic weather conditions. Dropping the engine on the various planes and creating a worst conditions landing situation is my current level. I want to get more proficient in 3d tricks.

Matrix Head

My other free time has been spent developing Noble Warfare since my last entry. Disentangling the battle.c file into something which is more readable and easier to debug. I might do a release this weekend depending on how far I get. I wanted to pull out all the matrix maths and possibly rewrite it with CompSci 101 vector maths to make it more readable for a broader number of programmers.

Back when I started developing Noble Warfare, I contacted the creators of the Larry Leadhead comics to see if they could contribute some inspirational art to the development. I never received a response from them, but I see part of my request email made it to the comments section of their site.

http://www.larryleadhead.org/book_comments.html

Good night.